How to Kiss an Undead Bride

by Edwards, Hailey

  The screen flashed again, and this time habit overruled heart.

  He reached for his cell and read the message. His lips thinned as he set the book spread across his lap—a fascinating treatise on cellularly revived brain tissue—on the nightstand. The woman in his arms he eased gently onto her pillow with an expertise that no longer woke her. Then, just as carefully, he stood without causing the mattress to dip.

  Dark hair cascaded over her pillow, and he already missed its silken caress. Her cheeks were flush from snuggling against him like she wanted to burrow under his skin and live there. Her eyelids twitched as she dreamed, her fingers curling into the sheets as she reached for him. Her lips parted, and a line gathered across her forehead. A punch of breath shot out of her lungs, and she whimpered like a child as tears gathered on her lashes.

  The dream came less often these days, usually when she slept alone, but the past still exacted a toll on her in unguarded moments.

  Crossing to her side of the bed, he crouched next to her and began to sing, his voice barely a whisper.

  “The night birds are calling, calling, calling. The princess she’s falling, falling, falling. A stone for a heart and a blade for a tongue, fair beauty she slayed all her suitors but one. His armor was love, and his weapon this tune. Their battle was fierce, the casualties great, but fair beauty, she smiled as she lowered her gate.”

  The knotted muscles in her legs relaxed, and she rolled on her side, facing him in sleep as he sang.

  “I’ll be home soon.” He risked a gentle kiss to her forehead once he was certain she wouldn’t wake. “Sleep well.”

  He pulled on last night’s clothes then padded out into the winding hall past Lethe and Hood’s closed bedroom door. From there, he exited into the bustling foyer.

  Aware they were hosting necromancers, the pack kept things quiet as they ate breakfast and headed off to their jobs for the day.

  “What are you doing up?” Bo did a double take when she spotted him in passing as she carried plates piled high with food out of the kitchen. “I thought you guys were nocturnal.”

  Bo was a short black woman with a passion for Southern cooking she inherited from her father. A recent addition, she worked in the lavish kitchen to keep the pack fed and earned a generous salary doing it. She hadn’t been here long, but her skill had made her a favorite overnight.

  “I got a call.” He relieved her of the plates she had balanced on her forearm then opened the door into the dining room, which sat fifty people and was about half full this morning. “I need to meet the cleaners at Woolworth House.”

  “I’ll send Ty with you. Lord knows he’s been no help in the kitchen this morning. That boy eats twice as much as he cooks.” She snapped her fingers at her son, a lanky youth with scrambled egg hanging from the bristles in his sparse beard, who had been booted from the kitchen for his gluttony on more than one occasion. “Go help Linus.”

  Done serving the dishes, Linus straightened. “I’m perfectly capable of—”

  “Sweetie.” Bo turned a kind smile on him. “You’re about to marry my alpha’s best friend. Grier is pack, and that makes you pack. Pack never walks alone.” She dusted egg crumble off his sleeve. “And Lethe would kick my ass if something happened to you this close to the wedding.”

  Rather than injure Bo’s feelings, he conceded to an escort. “All right.”

  Ty shot up, a hop in his step, and bounded over to Linus.

  “Where are we going?” He bit into a rolled-up pancake with a sausage link center. “Are you going to scythe someone when we get there?”

  “Woolworth House,” he said, amused. “And not if I can help it.”

  The ice in his core grew thicker each time he took a life, and only Grier’s belief he was a good man had kept him from giving in to the cold that pulsed in time with his heart.

  “Cool.” He stole a muffin off a friend’s plate then shot out the door, pausing to yell, “Later, losers.”

  A half-dozen boys his age hurled parting obscenities back while stomping their feet to make it sound as if they were in pursuit. Ty should have known better than to run. Not because it would trigger their prey drive, but because no self-respecting gwyllgi would abandon a plate of food.

  Linus exited the den and began the short walk back to Woolly.

  “So.” Ty fell in step with him. “How many people have you killed?”

  The question, even when delivered with youthful guile, caused his skin to crawl. “How many have you killed?”

  The boy ruffled his floppy hair with a nervous hand. “Rabbits or…?”

  “People.”

  “None.” He stumbled over his feet. “I wouldn’t…” He caught his balance before he fell. “I mean…” He fumbled to correct himself. “I would to protect the pack but…”

  “You wouldn’t feel good about it later.”

  “No,” Ty said slowly. “I guess you don’t either?”

  “There would be something fundamentally wrong with me if I did.”

  “I get it.” He jingled the chain anchoring his wallet to his jeans. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  The body count Linus had amassed while acting as the Potentate of Atlanta was a burden he alone would bear. Not even Grier knew his tally, an act of cowardice he wasn’t brave enough to rectify. “Do you have any other questions?”

  Eyes bright, he jumped right in. “How did you land a girl as hot as Grier?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he meant it.

  “Oh.” Ty deflated. “I thought maybe you cast a spell on her.”

  “Love isn’t real if it’s forced.”

  “Theoretically, though.” He forged ahead. “It’s possible?”

  “Most things are possible,” Linus allowed. “A thing is only impossible until you’ve done it.”

  “You’re a pretty wise dude.” Ty nodded with respect. “I bet that’s why Grier chose you.”

  A flurry of activity on the lawn at Woolworth House distracted Linus from the teen’s interrogation.

  “Wait here.” He indicated a bench set well away from the property line. “Keep watch, but don’t come any closer until I give you the all clear.”

  The cleaners worked fast, but you could never be too careful when it came to gwyllgis and bronze.

  “Sure thing.” He stretched out the length of the concrete. “Mind if I play a game on my phone?”

  “Go ahead.”

  With his well-intended escort otherwise occupied, Linus went in search of Gilly. He found her swabbing the steps leading into the rear garden, evidence of their hasty departure.

  Frozen at the age of thirty, with her wide blue eyes and sleek blonde hair, she could have passed for a college student on the campus at Strophalos University, where he was once a professor. But she was human, or at least she started out that way.

  A changeling who escaped her adoptive fae parents, Gilly fled back to her human birth family at the age of ten to discover she had been replaced with an identical copy. She waited until after dark, crept back into the house, and drowned the thing in the tub, believing it to be a bundle of twigs or handful of ribbons enchanted to look like her. Except the spell didn’t break. The duplicate hadn’t been real, but it hadn’t been fake either. It had been a sick fae child its parents wanted gone before their clan noticed its weakness and killed it. It died anyway.

  “Hate to pull you out of bed,” she said, rising at his approach, “but I knew you would want to see this.”

  “What have you found?”

  She waved him into the house after her. “You saw the origin, correct?”

  “A bouquet of flowers.”

  “There was more.” She brought him to the counter and indicated a plastic evidence baggie. “This was in the bottom of the vase.”

  Crimson liquid sloshed inside the hollow glass bangle when he lifted it. “An avowal.”

  Danill Volkov had given Grier one identical to it, down to the ornate clasp, but this was a clever forgery, not the
original. Linus had broken that one to use the blood inside as ink for the tattoo that protected her against vampiric compulsion.

  “You get how rare these are? How valuable?” She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “Who would hide it in a vase?”

  “Someone who wanted to send a message but knew their gift would be turned away at the door.”

  “You’re getting married soon.” She began piecing it together. “There are bouquets all over the house.” Eight others had been disassembled in the same way. “Probably safe to assume that if a necromancer or human opened the door, they wouldn’t have spotted anything wrong with the flowers.”

  Two or three bouquets had arrived with fine glitter dusting the petals, so no. Only a gwyllgi would have noticed, especially since the concentration required Lethe to press her nose against the petals before experiencing a reaction.

  “Without the bronze powder,” he said, thinking it through, “the avowal wouldn’t have been found until the flowers wilted, and the vases were dumped and cleaned for storage.”

  “Then your gwyllgi friends weren’t the intended target, just a necessary catalyst.”

  Linus set the bangle down before he crushed it in his fist and ruined a damning piece of evidence. “Who delivered these flowers?”

  “Flower Power.” She rolled her eyes. “Check the bottom of the vase.”

  A tie-dye swirl in red, yellow, and orange made it hard to focus on the white logo hidden within. “That’s on River Street, right?”

  “Near one of the candy kitchens, the one with the caramel apples as big as your fist.”

  “I’ll speak with the owner, see if they can tell us who made the purchase.”

  The shop name rang familiar, but he couldn’t put a finger on why he should know it.

  “Your fiancée is the Potentate of Savannah. Are you sure she shouldn’t be handling this?”

  The avowal drew his eye again. “No.”

  Danill Volkov’s obsession with her put her and everyone around her at risk. For that reason, despite how the power writhing under his skin howled at him to protect her at any cost, he wouldn’t hide this development from her.

  They were partners. Equals. She had earned the right to face danger how she saw fit. All he cared was that she allowed him to stand by her side.

  “All right.” She held up her hands. “I’m not getting between two potentates.”

  One potentate and one… He didn’t really know how to classify himself. As her assistant? The first member of her team? He would have to ask her, after the wedding, where she saw him fitting into that part of her life.

  He paid her a tight smile for the joke. “Call me when the blood tests come back.”

  Cocking her head to one side, she studied him. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “You’ve read Grier’s file.” He kept a hard copy himself, which he manually updated with notes that would never see the light of day, but the original had been downloaded from the cleaners’ database. They kept files on each member of every supernatural race. Gilly wouldn’t have contacted him before reading it for herself. “You must be thinking the same.”

  “Volkov.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, then checked his watch. “I should go if I want to catch the florist before he closes for lunch.”

  A quick chat with the owner at Flower Power, and then Linus could return home and climb into a warm bed with Grier. She hated waking alone, so he did his best to keep his daytime ramblings to a minimum.

  Exiting the house, he dialed up his mother’s car service, hating to waste time on ceremony.

  While he waited, he leaned against the siding to comfort a distraught Woolly.

  “This will all be over soon,” he assured her, but the curtains behind him rustled on a sigh. “It’s not your fault Lethe got hurt. We all missed it.” That had been the point, to slide it past their guard but ensure it would be found sooner rather than later. “We’ll be more careful going forward.”

  The nearest light flashed, but it was hard to catch the meaning with the sun overhead.

  “I have to visit River Street.” He straightened with reluctance. The hustle of strangers within her preyed on her insecurities, and he regretted the necessity of leaving. “I’ll go to Lethe’s from there, but Grier and I will both be home tonight.”

  Home.

  The simple word resonated with enough force to shatter him. His mother loved him, and his father had too, but the home where he grew up was nothing like this one. Not because Woolly was a thinking, feeling being, but because Grier kept her full of laughter and love the likes of which he had never experienced until she opened her heart to him. Maud had done her best by Grier, but she was a Society Dame to the bone. Grier was… More genuine. More real. More everything.

  She was his everything for certain.

  The planks beneath his feet bucked, shooing him off the porch, and he got the message. The sooner he left, the sooner he could return. With Grier.

  The standard-issue crimson sedan arrived before he reached the gate, but that was to be expected for the premium rates charged to the Lyceum for the vehicle’s use. The driver hopped out and rounded the car, and Linus allowed him to open the door and then close it after he settled on the backseat. He hated the show, the attention it brought to him, but spectacle was the price of being Clarice Woolworth Lawson’s son.

  “Where to, sir?”

  “Flower Power on River Street.”

  His eyebrows twitched higher up his forehead, which was peculiar considering Morrison took care to maintain a mask of professional boredom even during the most trying circumstances.

  “Something the matter?”

  “There’s a young man running behind us, waving his arms. I believe he’s yelling stop.” He jerked his chin toward the rearview mirror. “Should I?”

  The avowal, and what it portended, had wiped his young escort from Linus’s thoughts. It was for the best that he stay behind, considering the florist was the origin of the contaminated bouquet. Ty was young by gwyllgi standards, and he would be more susceptible than most. Those were the excuses he made to Ty when he texted him orders to return home.

  “No.” He waved him on. “Keep going.”

  Behind them, Ty stopped in his tracks, eyes on his phone, but he didn’t look happy about the dismissal.

  Morrison continued on, his expression once again a solemn mask, until they arrived at their destination. He parked in front of the florist, and while Linus waited to be released from the confines of the car, he admitted, at least to himself, that he missed the freedom Atlanta had given him. Savannah came with the bonds of expectation, tradition, and familial responsibilities that grew suffocating at times.

  However, Savannah also came with Grier.

  For her, he would fold himself behind the mask of Scion Lawson and play dutiful son in public. Soon he would be married, and the only expectations a Society husband was truly expected to meet were his wife’s.

  A soft laugh took Linus by surprise, and Morrison flicked his gaze into the rearview mirror before returning it to the front windshield.

  Grier would have her fingers beneath any and all of his masks, prying them off his face for good. Her insistence she see him, the truth of him, made it harder to push back the howling abyss that swirled through his thoughts as his power coiled beneath his skin, but she was his light in the dark, and she would never allow him to get lost as he had in the beginning.

  “This won’t take long.” Linus straightened his jacket. “You can circle around. Once ought to do it.”

  River Street’s cobbled road made driving jarring. There were also the trolley tracks and trolleylike tour buses to consider. Pedestrian congestion, especially now as it drew closer to lunch, would keep Morrison mired in standstill traffic for a while, giving Linus plenty of time to conduct his interview.

  Flower Power was impossible to miss. The facade blended in with its neighbors, but a tie-dye painting covered every inch of its storefront windo
w in swirling reds, yellows, and oranges. On this scale, the name was easier to read, but he couldn’t fathom why anyone would risk a migraine to enter the shop.

  A bell above the door tinkled when he did just that. The tie-dye motif continued on all four walls, but thankfully those were mostly covered floor to ceiling with simple black plant stands and flowering stock.

  The air smelled green, not floral, but lush. Sprays of flowering white dogwood branches leaned against tubs overflowing with cupped and double roses. Magnolia blossoms rested in bins, and a large ceramic planter held peonies, azaleas, sweet peas, and hydrangeas in soft colors. Water-filled bins stuffed the aisles, and arrangements in the making littered a large workspace behind the counter, further tickling the back of his mind.

  “Can I help you?” An older gentleman wielding a hose stepped from behind a display of live plants. His shirt matched the theme, but a dark-green smock made looking at him easier. “We’re having a ten percent off sale.” He gestured around his shop to the eye-popping signs. “You’ll have to forgive the mess. I’m prepping for a big wedding, and the delivery truck just left.”

  “The Woolworth-Lawson wedding,” Linus said, the shop name finally gelling for him.

  “That’s it.” He smiled wide. “The bride is a sweet little thing, wanted a theme to make her mother proud. That’s what she said. It’s country garden, if you can’t tell.” He laughed, clearly in his element. “You must have seen a notice in the papers.”

  Admitting he was the Lawson half of the equation was out of the question, given how talkative the man was without knowing his identity. Pride he and his shop landed the illustrious account puffed up his chest with good reason. Grier could have hired anyone, in this state or any other, but she supported local businesses whenever possible. The money allotted for their wedding would be spread out across shops all over the city but no further.

  “I’m Detective Baker with the Savannah Police Department.” He produced his badge, authentic and issued under that alias, and watched the man’s lips move over the numbers as if memorizing them. “I need to ask you a few questions about an order that was delivered from this location yesterday afternoon.”